Thoughts on Life, Love, Politics, Hypocrisy and Coming Out in Mid-Life

Friday, April 27, 2018

The Republican Party's War on the Poor

The Republican Party and its most reliable base, evangelical Christians, bloviate endlessly about their supposed support for "Christian values" and worship of the Bible and its admonitions. Yet the policies they pursue and support are diametrically opposed to Christ's principles and values as laid out in the Gospels. Indeed, Matthew 25:41-46 states as follows:

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart
from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the
devil and his angels.42 For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was
thirsty and you gave me no drink,43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked
and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’44 Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did
we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and
did not minister to you?’45 Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to
you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it
to me.’46 And these will go away into eternal punishment,
but the righteous into eternal life.”

The dishonesty and hypocrisy of these Republicans and evangelical Christians is truly mind numbing. A column in the New York Times underscores just how far apart the Gospel message and the evangelical Christian/Republican agenda have become. Here are column highlights:

America
hasn’t always, or even usually, been governed by the best and the brightest;
over the years, presidents have employed plenty of knaves and fools. But I
don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like the collection of petty grifters and
miscreants surrounding Donald Trump. Price, Pruitt, Zinke, Carson and now Ronny
Jackson: At this point, our default assumption should be that there’s something
seriously wrong with anyone this president wants on his team.

Still,
we need to keep our eye on the ball. The perks many Trump officials demand —
the gratuitous first-class travel, the double super-secret soundproof phone
booths, and so on — are outrageous, and they tell you a lot about the kind of
people they are. But what really matters are their policy decisions. Ben
Carson’s insistence on spending taxpayer funds on a $31,000 dining set is ridiculous; his proposal to sharply raise housing costs for hundreds of
thousands of needy American families, tripling rents for some of the poorest
households, is vicious.

And
this viciousness is part of a broader pattern. Last year, Trump and his allies
in Congress devoted most of their efforts to coddling the rich; this was
obviously true of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, but even the assault on Obamacare
was largely about securing hundreds of billions in tax cuts for the wealthy.
This year, however, the G.O.P.’s main priority seems to be making war on the
poor.

That
war is being fought on multiple fronts. The move to slash housing subsidies
follows moves to sharply increase work requirements for those seeking food
stamps. Meanwhile, the administration has been granting Republican-controlled
states waivers allowing them to impose onerous new work requirements for
recipients of Medicaid — requirements whose main effect would probably be not
more work, but simply fewer people getting essential health care.

The
interesting question is not whether Trump and friends are trying to make the
lives of the poor nastier, more brutal and shorter. They are. The question,
instead, is why.

Is
it about saving money? Conservatives do complain about the cost of safety net
programs, but it’s hard to take those complaints seriously coming from people
who just voted to explode the budget deficit with huge tax cuts. Moreover,
there’s good evidence that some of the programs under attack actually do what
tax cuts don’t: eventually pay back a significant part of their upfront costs
by promoting better economic performance.

For
example, the creation of the food stamp program didn’t just make the lives of
recipients a bit easier. It also had major positive impacts on the long-term health of
children from poor families, which made them more productive as adults — more
likely to pay taxes, less likely to need further public assistance.

The
same goes for Medicaid, where new studies suggest that more than half of each
dollar spent on health care for children eventually comes back as higher tax receipts from
healthier adults.

So
what’s really behind the war on the poor? Pretty clearly, the pain this war
will inflict is a feature, not a bug. Trump and his friends aren’t punishing
the poor reluctantly, out of the belief that they must be cruel to be kind.
They just want to be cruel.

Glenn Thrush of The New York Times reported, “Mr.
Trump, aides said, refers to nearly every program that provides benefits to
poor people as welfare, a term he regards as derogatory.” And I guess you can
see where that comes from. After all, he’s a self-made man who can’t attribute
any of his own success to, say, inherited wealth. Oh, wait.

Seriously,
a lot of people both in this administration and in Congress simply feel no
empathy for the poor. Some of that lack of empathy surely reflects racial
animus. But while the war on the poor will disproportionately hurt minority
groups, it will also hurt a lot of low-income whites — in fact, it will surely
end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?

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Out gay attorney in a committed relationship; formerly married and father of three wonderful children; sometime activist and political/news junkie; survived coming out in mid-life and hope to share my experiences and reflections with others.
In the career/professional realm, I am affiliated with Caplan & Associates PC where I practice in the areas of real estate, estate planning (Wills, Trusts, Advanced Medical Directives, Financial Powers of Attorney, Durable Medical Powers of Attorney); business law and commercial transactions; formation of corporations and limited liability companies and legal services to the gay, lesbian and transgender community, including birth certificate amendment.

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